The wild, wild East

The weekend seems like a million years ago rather than just yesterday, but I'll try to recall it as best I can.

First, I have to mention the Hauptbahnhoff in Hannover. I'm a big fan of the trainstations here. They are big, and busy, a lot like American malls but busier and with trains coming and going all the time. The one in Hannover is even bigger than the one in Munich and when I arrived there, late on Friday night, a soccer game had just let out so it was packed with soccer fans. It was also packed with teenagers all of whom were buying liquor and condoms. The eagerness of teenagers to buy liquor seems to me to indicate that it's legality has not diminished its popularity, if anything it's the opposite. In any event it was kind of funny to watch 16 year-olds walking, hand in hand, determinedly to the liquor and condom sections of the stores in the Hauptbahnhoff. The Braunschweig Hauptbahnhoff, by the way, had well over a thousand bicycles parked in front of it.


Saturday my dad and step mom picked me up in Hannover and showed me around my step mom's home town. Wulfenbuetel's claim to fame is that it is where Jagermeister is made. According to my parents when they went grocery shopping this past week in Wulfenbuetel the store was handing out free Jagermeister drinks. I can't say that I tried Jagermeister at the source tough. Instead I saw the Saturday market in town and took communion at the church of mustard. Seriously, there was a store there that sold nothing but mustard and you could sample any of the zillion or so varieties of mustard they had by putting it on communion wafers. You don't have to take my word for it, I got a picture.


After that we went to Goslar which was really fun. Goslar is famous for being the place where they used to burn witches back in the middle ages. Every shop there sells witch memorabilia. I didn't buy any witches but it was fun none the less. I saw the most adorable dog there. he looked full grown but his paws were huge, like puppy paws so maybe he was still growing. He was sleeping at first but then a couple of kids came into the square and were running around. He woke up and wanted to play with them but they were afraid. There was nothing to fear though, he was a gentle giant, and he liked me, he let me rub his tummy and shook hands with me with his gigantic paw. He was so cute I had to take his picture. When I get a dog I want one like this.


Saturday night we went to a rockabilly show in Eastern Germany. My stepmother got a warning from her mother as we were leaving. She told us to be careful in the "Wild East". My stepmother explained that it was a double warning because we were not only going to the Wild East but also to a rockabilly show. Rockabilly here attracts a neo-nazi crowd apparently. When my step mom was a teenager here they had banned certain types of clothes because they were associated with the neo-nazi movement and people dressed a certain way weren't allowed into the shows. Also, the east really is a little wild. The autobahn stops at a certain point, in fact we took it all the way to the end. They're was no autobahn in the east when they first opened up the border (in 1989) and a lot of the towns were really run down so they've been pouring money into building autobahns and restoring some of the old historic villages but it's a project that will probably still be going on for many years to come.

There were, in fact, a lot of skin heads at the rockabilly show. My step mom speculated that they were primarily there for the psychobilly act that opened the show, but also that it was Saturday night and there isn't much to do there so a show of any kind brings everyone out. I don't know that the skin heads are any different here than they are in the US, but...well, in the US I get the impression that it's mostly posturing. It's a style not a movement in the US. It seems like the ideology comes with the style more here. Maybe that's just cultural bias on my part. Perhaps being in the wild east got to me. Though, even here in the west, they have extra precautions to deter the violent tendencies of the neo-nazis. There are police in St. Jakobs Platz every morning when I walk through on my way to class.

It was definitely odd being so close to what used to be the border of Germany and the GDR and then being in the former GDR. During our excursion to Goslar my step mom pointed out the highest point in the Harz Mountains which used to be in the GDR or maybe in the demilitarized zone. It makes me wonder what it was like to be here when the borders first opened up. My step mom said the autobahn was extremely congested after the east opened because the old eastern cars couldn't drive faster than 80 k/h and ultimately they had to add extra lanes. The wall came down in November 1989, my step mom would have been almost 20 at the time. It must have been very odd to be a teenager when all that was happening, although I think by then my step mom was living in Munich which is at the other end of the country and was, perhaps, less affected by it.

Another thing there was a lot of at this rockabilly show was smoke. I think every person there, aside from my father, stepmother and me, was chain smoking. Even when they were dancing they all had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.

The bands were pretty good, but often difficult to understand because they sang in English but with thick accents. My dad and step mom, who are much bigger rockabilly fans than I, said they recognised some of the songs the first band played, but not many because they played so fast. According to them one of the schools of psychobilly is just to play everything twice as fast. Ironically that band (The Tombstone Surfers), I think, seemed to speak less accented English so they could have been more easily comprehended if they'd played slower. The third band (Desperado 5) was definitely the best and they had a saxophone player. I really enjoy horns in rock music. I would have been able to enjoy it more though if it hadn't been so smokey. I miss my nice smoke-free Seattle music scene.

On Sunday we ventured into Braunschweig, which is the "big city" compared to Wulfenbuetel. There was a gigantic flea market there and I picked up some interesting purchases. A lot of downtown Braunschweig was destroyed in the war so it's an interesting mix of old and new architecture. There is a particularly odd new building right in front of a really old church and across the street from a building that was reconstructed exactly as it had been before the bombings (but also attached to a brand new mall). It's an odd juxtaposition, and I'm not sure this photograph does it justice.


We had lunch across the street from the new old castle in Braunschweig and I had an "Alterbier" (I think). It is apparently a Northern German specialty, served with fruit in the bottom of the glass (in this case strawberries). It is one of about a million kinds of specialty beer that I've been told I have to try while I'm here. Since the soccer tickets are all sold out and the opera tickets are all sold out I guess that leaves beer drinking as my main tourist activity. Stay tuned for a beer update, some talk about lions, Prague, and possibly more pictures of cute furry animals.

And for Alice, a picture of the food I had for lunch that day. I've been forgetting to take pictures of all the food for you, but I remembered that day.